Matthew Lutz

The Reliability Challenge to moral non-naturalism has received substantial attention recently in the literature on moral epistemology. While the popularity of this particular challenge is a recent development, this form of the challenge can be traced back to a skeptical challenge in the philosophy of mathematics raised by Paul Benacerraf. The current Reliability Challenge is widely regarded as the most sophisticated way to develop this skeptical line of thinking, making the Reliability Challenge the strongest epistemic challenge to normative non-naturalism. In this chapter, I argue that the innovations that have occurred since Benacerraf’s statement of the challenge are misconceived and confused in a number of ways. The Reliability Challenge is not the most potent epistemic challenge to moral non-naturalism. The most potent challenge comes from the fact that there is a causal condition on knowledge—or, more precisely, a _becaual_ condition—that non-natural moral facts cannot satisfy.

In this book, Spencer Case and Matt Lutz debate whether objective moral facts exist. We often say that actions like murder and institutions like slavery are morally wrong. And sometimes people strenuously disagree about the moral status of actions, as with abortion. But what, if anything, makes statements about morality true? Should we be realists about morality, or anti-realists? After the authors jointly outline the major contemporary positions in the moral realism debate, each author argues for his own preferred views and responds to the other’s constructive arguments and criticisms. Case contends that there are moral truths that don't depend on human beliefs or attitudes. Lutz maintains that there are no moral truths, and even if there were, we wouldn't be in a position to know about them. Along the way, they explore topics like the nature of common sense, the meaning of moral language, and why the realism/anti-realism debate matters. The authors develop their own arguments and responses, but assume no prior knowledge of metaethics. The result is a highly accessible exchange, providing new students with an opinionated gateway to this important area of moral philosophy. But the authors’ originality gives food for thought to seasoned philosophers as well.

A skeptical hypothesis argument introduces a scenario—a skeptical hypothesis—where our beliefs about some subject matter are systematically false, but our experiences do not discriminate between the case where our beliefs are true and the skeptical scenario where they are not. Because we are unable to rule out this scenario, we do not know that any of our beliefs about the subject matter are true. This is a familiar kind of skeptical argument and, in this case, familiarity breeds contempt. Epistemologists have developed a variety of strategies for responding to skeptical hypothesis arguments, and so it is widely assumed that any such argument must fail. In this paper, I present a skeptical hypothesis argument—the Moral Closure Argument—and argue that this argument succeeds where other skeptical hypothesis arguments fail. I do so by examining some of the most popular and promising lines of response to skeptical hypothesis arguments, and showing that they all fail to rebut the Moral Closure Argument. This makes the Moral Closure Argument a particularly potent version of a skeptical hypothesis argument. It presents a surprisingly strong case for moral skepticism.

The goal of this paper is to defend Simple Modest Invariantism (SMI) about knowledge from the threat presented by pragmatic encroachment. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical circumstances are relevant in some way to the truth of knowledge ascriptions—and if this is true, it would entail the falsity of SMI. Drawing on Ross and Schroeder’s recent Reasoning Disposition account of belief, I argue that the Reasoning Disposition account, together with Grice’s Maxims, gives us an attractive pragmatic account of the connection between knowledge ascriptions and practical circumstances. This gives us the ability to explain away the data that is supposed to support pragmatic encroachment. Finally, I address three important objections to the view offered by giving a pragmatic account of when it is conversationally appropriate to cancel a conversational implicature, and discussing when sentences with true content can end up sounding false as well as cases where sentences with false content can end up sounding true

In a recent paper in this journal, Bengson, Cuneo and Reiser (hereafter bcr) present a novel epistemic challenge to naturalist moral realism, which they call the Projectability Challenge. The Projectability Challenge aims to show that there is an important epistemic phenomenon, projectability, that naturalists are unable to explain, but which non-naturalists can explain. This flips a familiar dynamic on its head, since it is typically argued that the moral naturalist has epistemic advantages over the moral non-naturalist (see, e.g., Joyce 2006, Ch. 6; Bedke 2009). In this response, I argue that bcr dramatically underestimate the theoretical resources available to naturalists to explain the phenomenon of projectability. While bcr argue that no variety of moral naturalism can explain projectability, I contend that all varieties of moral naturalism can explain projectability. There is no projectability problem for any kind of naturalist realism.

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments purport to show that our moral beliefs do not amount to knowledge because these beliefs are “debunked” by the fact that our moral beliefs are, in some way, the product of evolutionary forces. But there is a substantial gap in this argument between its main evolutionary premise and the skeptical conclusion. What is it, exactly, about the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs that would create problems for realist views in metaethics? I argue that evolutionary debunking arguments are best understood as offering up defeaters for our moral beliefs. Moreover, the defeater in question is a paradigmatic instance of undercutting defeat. If anything is an undercutting defeater, then learning about the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs is a defeater for those beliefs.

David Enoch has argued that we can be justified in believing in irreducibly normative reasons on the grounds that such reasons are deliberatively indispensable. This deliberative indispensability argument has been attacked from a variety of angles and is generally held to be rather weak. In this paper, I argue that existing criticisms of the deliberative indispensability argument do not touch the core of Enoch's argument. Properly understood, the deliberative indispensability argument is much stronger than its critics allege. It deserves to be taken seriously.

Error theorists hold that, although our first-order moral thought and discourse commits us to the existence of moral truths, there are no such truths. Holding this position in metaethics puts the error theorist in an uncomfortable position regarding first-order morality. When it comes to our pre-theoretic moral commitments, what should the error theorist think? What should she say? What should she do? I call this the ‘Now What’ Problem for error theory. This paper suggests a framework for evaluating different approaches to the ‘Now What’ Problem, and goes on to evaluate the three most common responses to this problem. All three are found to have noteworthy problems. Finally, I present my own solution, and argue that it presents the most appealing solution to the ‘Now What’ Problem

In this paper, I provide a novel explanationist framework for thinking about peer disagreement that solves many of the puzzles regarding disagreement that have troubled epistemologists over the last two decades. Explanationism is the view that a subject is justified in believing a proposition just in case that proposition is part of the best explanation of that subject’s total evidence. Applying explanationism to the problem of peer disagreement yields the following principle: in cases of peer disagreement, the thing that the subjects ought to believe is the thing that is the best explanation of their total evidence, where part of their evidence is the fact that they happen to find themselves in disagreement with an epistemic peer. In what follows, I show how to understand and apply this core idea.

The Reliability Challenge to moral non-naturalism has received substantial attention recently in the literature on moral epistemology. While the popularity of this particular challenge is a recent development, the challenge has a long history, as the form of this challenge can be traced back to a skeptical challenge in the philosophy of mathematics raised by Paul Benacerraf. The current Reliability Challenge is widely regarded as the most sophisticated way to develop this skeptical line of thinking, making the Reliability Challenge the strongest epistemic challenge to normative nonnaturalism. In this paper, I argue that the innovations that have occurred since Benacerraf’s statement of the challenge are misconceived and confused in a number of ways. The Reliability Challenge is not the most potent epistemic challenge to moral non-naturalism. The most potent challenge comes from the fact that there is a causal condition on knowledge – or, more precisely, a becaual condition – that non-natural moral facts cannot satisfy.